President Donald Trump and the GOP’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is far from beautiful and deeply unpopular with the public. Battling concerns from voters about increased barriers to accessing programs like Medicaid and food assistance; massive transfers of wealth from less fortunate Americans to corporations and the rich; and the mass deregulation of industries like crypto and AI, Vice President J.D. Vance is attempting a new tactic to persuade the hesitant: ignore all of that and focus on how much money the bill is giving to ICE.
“The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The [One Big Beautiful Bill] fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass,” Vance wrote Tuesday on X.
“Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” he added.
The millions of people who are expected to lose access to their health insurance as a result of the legislation would likely beg to differ.
The version of the legislation passed by the House would give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over $100 billion for the construction of new immigration detention centers, increasing arrest and deportation efforts, militarization of the border and the hiring of new agents.
Such a massive windfall for immigration enforcement comes as ICE has blown through its annual budget months before the end of the fiscal year. In May, during a hearing of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) laid into the reckless spending of the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem.
“You are spending like you don’t have a budget. You are on the verge of running out of money for the fiscal year […] You are ignoring the immigration laws of this nation, implementing a brand-new immigration system that you have invented that has little relation to the statutes that you are required — that you are commanded — to follow as spelled out in your oath of office,“ Murphy said. “Your agency acts as if laws don’t matter, as if the election gave you some mandate to violate the Constitution and the laws passed by this Congress. It did not give you that mandate.”
Through the reconciliation bill and presidential policy, Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration are looking to give DHS and ICE that mandate. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has demanded that ICE detain at least 3,000 migrants a day. As the reconciliation bill continues to move through the Senate, Trump and Noem traveled to Florida on Tuesday to tour the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” a migrant detention center built in the hostile backwaters of the Florida Everglades.
“We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator,” Trump said ahead of his visit to the center. “Don’t run in a straight line,” Trump said, waving his hand in a zig-zag to demonstrate how a detainee might potentially need to move to escape a half-ton reptile.
This kind of callous cruelty is what the administration is focused on, whether it be its treatment of migrants, or dismissing kicking millions off of their health care as insignificant “minutiae.”
